Malorie(14)

She looks down once more to the pages on the floor.

The names stand out to her, even now, as she stands far from them, at the door, her hand on the knob. The names seem to be written in something like steel, impossible to remove, hardier than she is. As if the names themselves wear blindfolds and will therefore survive this new world long after Malorie succumbs to it.

She closes her eyes.

She opens the office door then closes it again without leaving the room.

She returns to the page about the train.

“Mom?” Tom calls from the outer office. “You need help in there?”

She doesn’t answer. She reads:

Because of the existing tracks, a train is the safest mode of transportation in the new world. No fear of driving up onto a curve, hitting a parked car, hitting a person.

No. No. It’s too good. Too possible. And nothing, Malorie knows, absolutely nothing is so ready-made these days.

But she reads on.

So long as the tracks are clear, and the machine travels at a slow enough speed…

Malorie looks away. She feels pain. Literal, physical, pain. Are her parents alive? Have they been alive this whole time?

She thinks of Shannon’s face, telling her they weren’t answering their phone anymore. She thinks of Shannon’s dead body upstairs.

By her own hand.

The guilt for not having sought out Sam and Mary Walsh, to verify their deaths, is almost too rich to endure. It’s been seventeen years.

The Blind Train runs on tracks between Lansing, Michigan, and Mackinaw City, Michigan.

Mackinaw City, Malorie thinks. The very tip of the Lower Peninsula. The bottom of the bridge that connects it to the Upper.

The train travels at no more than five miles an hour. It runs on coal. The windows are painted black. I know almost nothing more about it for I have yet to ride it myself.

“Nope,” Malorie says.

But she’s already feeling the very tips of the fingers of yes.

She closes her eyes and exits the inner office.

“Mom,” Olympia says.

“I need to speak with Ron Handy,” she says.

“The door is closed, Mom,” Tom says.

She opens her eyes. She sees her two teens looking back at her with flushed faces. This must all be so incredibly exciting to them. This unreality. This lie.

“We’ll walk you there,” Tom says. “We can use my—”

“No,” she says. “I need to speak to him alone.”

She needs to speak to an adult is what she needs. Even one twice as paranoid as herself.

Ron Handy is the closest neighbor they have. At three miles, the former gas station he dwells in is far, but close enough.

She needs the self-proclaimed Humorous Hermit because she can hardly breathe. It feels like, any second, her parents could die again. If they are alive, if they also survived these seventeen years, what’s to stop them from dying right now…right now…

RIGHT NOW?

“Jesus,” she says. She can’t get a firm hold on any of her reactions, opinions, feelings. She imagines herself on a blind train. She imagines the people who run it. She imagines herself and her teens waiting at a train station for a month, a year, ten years, never knowing when the train is coming, not allowed to look up the tracks for a headlight in the distance.

Olympia steps to her, takes her hand.

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’s gonna be okay.”

But the words bring Malorie no comfort. It’s been seventeen years.

“I need to talk to Ron Handy,” she says again. Then she’s tying her blindfold around her head, a motion she’s done so many times that it’s as natural as tucking her hair behind her ears.

“Close your eyes,” she tells them. Even now. Even as the reality she’s finally gotten used to has been cracked again, as she feels the physical pain of grief’s reversal or perhaps grief all over again, even now she tells her teens to close their eyes.

“Okay,” Olympia says.

“Closed,” Tom says.

Malorie opens the office door and steps out onto a wood floor that feels too sturdy, doesn’t conform to her idea of life right now, doesn’t line up with the absolute darkness she falls through, a place where it’s impossible to decipher the right or wrong thing to do.





FIVE


Malorie discovered Ron Handy before she found Camp Yadin. A decade ago, she’d smelled the distant odor of gasoline, walking her then six-year-olds in search of a new home. Hoping for canned goods or packaged snacks, she followed the scent to what she couldn’t have known was his home, a fortified service station on the side of a Michigan country road. Ron Handy lives behind wood boards, fat mattresses, car doors, and layers of sheet metal. As far as Malorie knows, he won’t even remove his blindfold inside.

Now, as she reaches the gravel shoulder of that same road, her nerves electrified, her head dizzy with too many possibilities, she realizes it’s been three years since she’s visited him. Ron has never come into Camp Yadin. Ron doesn’t leave his place. Ever.

The old-world instinct of looking both ways before crossing the street has long been exterminated, and Malorie hurries across the gravel to the pebbled gas station lot. For all she knows, Ron Handy is dead inside, rotting, mad flies buzzing and breeding on his remains.